Amy broke the silence.“Moms gone but I have you please don’t you leave me”I burst into tears assuring her I was here to stay. She hugged me so t...ght it hurt but I was not about to push her away. A nurse appeared to check we were ok and offer us a coffee I ordered us all one and she went to fetch it. Mike got up and approached us and we had a 3 way hug. The nurse appeared with the coffee and we left the room shutting the door. Sitting in the ante room we sipped our coffee without a word being. The way the collar spread out over my collarbone, it distributed the pressure pretty evenly, not on my neck at all. But WTF was she doing?A few seconds later, I felt my legs being pulled underneath the chair. She’d hooked something to the cuffs on my ankles and was pulling them back. And I realized what was happening, she’d hooked a strap from the neck collar to the cuffs and was in the process of pulling it tight so that my legs were pulled back under the chair and up, trapping me so that I. I just went from “Four-eyed Fatso” to “Frankie Four-eyes.”I wasn’t the only kid picked on and some of them had it even worse than I did. Sally Meyers was a bit heavy and her mother always sent her to school in pig-tails so she was “Piggy Pig-tails.” Louis Altman was born with one leg shorter than the other and because of it he looked awkward when he walked and that earned him two nicknames. To some he was “Lurching Lou” and to others he was “Limping Louie.” I often wondered if their parents. The water was cool and refreshing. The sun was warm and my Aunt worked her way out of the tent wearing a pale blue bikini top and bottom. The top was strapless and was doing everything possible to keep her full breasts from coming out. She just smiled and confidently walked towards where I was wading in the stream. She had a couple Corona beers as well. Just what I needed to take the edge off. I cracked the bottles open and took a couple of gulps trying to seem interesting and at ease. I tried.